Helen Mullen, a Doctoral student in the Department of Management Science, recently completed an ESRC-funded internship with Creative England in Manchester. Creative England is a publicly funded organisation that provides support to Film, Television, Games and Digital & Creative Services in the English regions outside London in areas such as talent and company development, new market and investment identification, advocacy and the stimulation of new content, products and services.
Johanna Bolhoven, Cluster Manager at Creative England, said, "The meaningful nature of the ESRC student internship scheme sets this programme apart from other programmes. Creative England benefitted from the insight and experience of a truly knowledgeable and passionate researcher."
Helen was selected for the Internship after a competitive process. She worked as a researcher for three months on 'Cluster2020', a European-funded project that provided practical guidance to organisations about cluster and business development in the creative industries. It included partners from Belgium, France, Germany and the UK and was part of the European Creative Industries Alliance policy initiative to facilitate collaboration between policy makers and business support practitioners.
Helen was involved in a range of research and networking activities. She also produced two discussion papers for the project. The first, 'Cluster Excellence and Creative Industry Friendliness' was developed for the project partners and focused on business support. The second, 'Growth opportunities for the Creative Industries in Manchester' addressed opportunities for creative firms and formed the basis for consultation with experts via an online forum and facilitated workshop.
Joanna Bolhoven added, "Helen demonstrated professionalism throughout her time at Creative England. She helped develop a coherent research strategy for the Cluster2020 project which resulted in a robust, measurable and systematic approach to all associated work programme activity. Helen consistently went above and beyond her remit and whenever possible used her resourcefulness to find new way to tackle issues that we came across. She learned quickly how to integrate these ideas with our larger organisational objectives and this made it very easy for us to completely trust her with such a high profile project."
Helen said of the experience, "The Internship was productive, interesting, enjoyable and it exceeded my expectations. It provided an opportunity to develop my research and social skills in a non-academic environment, as well as enhancing my understanding about my research area. I believe that the variety of activities that I was involved in, and the range of contacts that I made, will prove useful during the PhD process and beyond."